Martin’s challenge is to put some more ‘orange’ into his Shared Island dialogue
‘I’M PROTESTANT and British – why ask me to talk about a United Ireland?’ That was the thrust of a very interesting contribution to an online youth dialogue which is part of the Shared Island talks which are now under way. The contribution, by a young woman called Georgina McKee Carter, was a breath of fresh air. It was also the kind of opinion too often ignored by ardent nationalists, some of whom insist they are ‘republicans’ without giving much thought to what that term actually means.
Taoiseach Micheál Martin is to be commended for starting this Shared Island dialogue which is both necessary and quite compelling at times. Recent tragic history tells us there are 3,600-plus reasons – the number of human lives needlessly lost in what we euphemistically call the Troubles – why this kind of effort not just makes sense, it is actually vital.
For most of my life, talk of a united Ireland was tiresome, pointless and generated too much ill will. But now realpolitik tells us that it is a realistic prospect – and something we must soon confront.
Sinn Féin and their pals, the recently retired sectarian murderers of the IRA, would rush us pell-mell into a border poll, which would very likely fail in almost everything bar opening still very tender wounds. Note the date and the time: I believe the Government’s approach is by far the better one – and I can’t remember when I believed such a thing.
But the strident unionist view, put in very gentle and surprisingly positive terms by Ms McKee Carter raised two key bugbears: How do you get the unionist community in the North to engage in such discussions? And what is the value of such a process if the unionists do not engage?
Clearly, many unionists will fight shy of talks about co-operation on things like coronavirus, mental health, climate change and myriad other issues which are meaningless without an all-island approach. But it goes a deal further when you consider that many people in the North choose not to see themselves as either “orange or green”. It is important to get those to also engage.
Ms McKee Carter began with a comment which will resonate with many people in every corner of this island. It is that the Irish flag is often associated with being “draped on terrorists’ coffins”.
It clearly eludes unionists that one third of our national flag recognises their identity and their potential to engage with the green of the Republic. Many of us will remember the joy with which we rediscovered our national flag in a positive piece of national identity revival during Italia ‘90, helped in no small measure by an English man, Jack Charlton.
Ms McKee Carter said she saw herself as a Protestant who valued the North being part of the United Kingdom and the prosperity which that brought. She stressed that she respects Irish nationalists’ reverence for the national flag.
She also said it made good sense to have “shared island dialogue” on issues like mental health, climate change and coronavirus. “It would be ridiculous not to,” she stressed.
But the rub came when she said she did not see any point in engaging in dialogue about constitutional change in Ireland.
“I just don’t feel Irish. So, how does my identity fit into that long-term?” she asked the conference.
There are two precedents for Micheál
Martin’s process which bode well for it. The first effort was the New Ireland Forum set up in 1983 by then-Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald, with a great deal of prompting from SDLP leader John Hume, and which ran for a year. It was boycotted by both unionists and Sinn Féin and it was derided as a “nationalists’ talking shop”.
Yet it was the first time since the 1920s that a large and representative group of constitutional nationalists had sat down together and contemplated Ireland, north and south. The forum’s final report cited three future options: a united Ireland, a federal agreement, or joint UK-Irish authority over the North.
UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher infamously attacked these options in her “out, out, out” speech. But in November 1985 she and Dr FitzGerald signed up to the Anglo-Irish Agreement which paved the way for the Good Friday pact.
The second precedent was the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation set up by Taoiseach Albert Reynolds in October 1994 in the wake of the IRA ceasefire. This time Sinn Féin was involved, as were the Ulster Unionist and Alliance Parties. It was disrupted by the IRA’s return to violence in spring of 1996 and later efforts to revive it did not work out.
Clearly, the difficulty for the current process is to get the Democratic Unionist Party and the Ulster Unionist Party to engage. When the Taoiseach launched the process last month, the DUP had a great ailibi in Covid-19.
A DUP spokesman told the Irish Independent that they had received the invitation and details of the online link from Roinn an Taoisigh. They said they may log in and have a look – other work commitments permitting. That is a ‘definite maybe’ which does not bode too well.
But for all that, we live in strange and changing times. In the past two decades we have seen things we could not have imagined even a short few years before, from Bertie Ahern and Ian Paisley standing at the Boyne to a deputy chief constable of the PSNI becoming the Garda Commissioner.
The poor north-south co-ordination on Covid 19 is, however, not encouraging. Astonishingly, the North is going into more restrictions just as the Republic is easing off. Part of it is a function of poor co-ordination across the UK, as London ordered a Covid rules tightening in many areas just as Cardiff did the opposite.
Still, it is lamentable that Dublin and Belfast did much better on mad cow disease and foot and mouth than it has done on human health.
We live in strange and changing times. In the past two decades we have seen things we could not have imagined even a short few years before